Tuesday, August 16, 2011

Hello World

This blog will be about the Madden-Julian Oscillation (MJO), and the upcoming field campaign in the Indian ocean to study it called Dynamics of the Madden-Julian Oscillation, acronym DYNAMO. The authors will include a team of scientists from Columbia University, Colorado State University, and Harvard University who will be (along with many others) involved in this campaign. For anyone reading this who doesn’t know what the MJO is, you might start here and maybe here, but we’ll explain it more in the next few weeks.

We have several purposes in putting up this blog, and don’t know yet which it will turn out to serve most. One is just as a record of our activities and what happens in the field, from a science point of view. Another is for our colleagues in climate science to be apprised of what is going on. Yet another is to do some public education for people outside the field who are interested in it.

The last will be travelogue. Each of us will go to the Maldives for a couple of weeks or so (at different times) to participate in the field campaign. We'll be on Gan island; looks like a nice place. Some scientists in our field do a lot of field work and go to exotic places often. We’re considered “modelers”, which means we work almost exclusively on computers and don’t need to travel (except sometimes to go to conferences). Only one of us, Sobel, has participated in a field campaign before, and him not many times. It will be a new and unusual experience for us, so we’re going to document it.

The team will consist of at least the following people:

Adam Sobel (Columbia)

Zhiming Kuang (Harvard)

Eric Maloney (Colorado State)

Daehyun Kim (Columbia)

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